Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books), page 11
“That’s crazy talk!” Moretti says. “You may be the best we’ve got, but you’re brash and inexperienced, and if you screw this up, it’s my ass on the line. So we do this by the book, dammit. Am I making myself clear?”
Wow, he’s laying it on awfully thick. But you’ve seen enough cop dramas to know how this plays out. “Sorry, Chief, but I play by my own rules.”
He sighs. “I was afraid of that. You’re sure there’s nothing I can say to make you change your mind?”
“Nothing,” you insist.
The earpiece he gave you has burrowed its way inside your helmet, and at this point it explodes, blasting your entire head into a lump of seared flesh and little pieces of charred bone. Wow. You did not see that coming. Moretti taps his earpiece, although with your face as disintegrated as it is, you’re technically too dead to hear what he says into it.
“Control? Yeah, it’s Moretti. Who else do we have who wants to be the chump in the suit?”
THE END
124
Space police or no, something’s not right here. And the Ox may not be a saint, but he’s been pretty straight with you so far. Also, you’re guessing any trip that starts out in a burlap sack doesn’t end with due process before a jury of one’s peers. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Fend off the supergestapo with mixed martial arts? Cosmic Guardian-types are busy gunning people down with ray beams, stuffing them in bags, and hauling them away. They don’t seem to be paying much attention to you, but the giant slug and the insect are zeroing in on your friend.
Here goes nothing. You trust your newly upgraded body and launch yourself at the Bug Guardian in what you hope will work out to be a flying roundhouse kick. It comes together surprisingly well. Your foot connects squarely with the thing’s helmet, knocking it backwards, where it collapses in a pile of limbs on the floor. That was awesome!
Rather than skittering to its feet, however, your opponent just lifts several of its arms to take aim at you. Crap! Something purple and tar-like starts spreading across your chest, and the alien fires a blast of blue light right into the stuff. What’s it doing? Covering you in space clay and trying to bake it on? The gunk quickly spreads until it covers you from the neck down, and the big bug keeps firing at you. You can’t even feel the blasts under all that goo.
Suddenly it dawns on you. The goo isn’t part of the bug’s attack. You’re doing this. The goo is your superpower.
Your superpower is disgusting.
Of all the ways to be mutated by a radioactive comet, you get the ability to cover yourself in purple slime? At this point your opponent just gives up on you and turns his attention back to the Ox, who has his hands full with his own attacker. He’s shrugging off the beam attacks as easily as you did (thanks, freaky purple goo!) but now the second alien grabs his arms from behind in a multi-limbed space insect sleeper hold. Ox is strong enough to bust through a concrete wall, yet the alien seems to have him pinned.
From what you know about the original Cosmic Guardian, he was just a regular guy inside a superpowered battle suit. So you decide to see how that suit holds up to an onslaught of gunk. You concentrate, and a ball of the stuff forms in your hand. It’s sticky, though, and when you attempt to fling it at the alien it stays half-stuck to you, with the rest of it splatting on the floor at your feet. Okay, time for plan B.
You leap onto the thing’s back and figure you’ll try pulling its helmet off. The goo seems to have bonded to your skin, increasing your strength exponentially. It gets everywhere, too, oozing over your opponent and seeping into the cracks in its armor. You pull and pull with all your newfound strength. It’s loosening! With one more yank the helmet comes free.
Except that — ew. The thing’s head pops right off along with it. It’s coated in superpowered goo, and as the bug dies you’re overcome by its mental anguish, as if it were beaming a squealing death rattle directly into your brain. Along with it, you get flashes of something different — cold, almost mechanical, but definitely living. It’s some form of communication, but it’s more imagery than it is verbal. FINAL STAGES… LONG JOURNEY… COLONY SHIP…
KILL ALL HUMANS.
The scrambled images fade, and you’re fairly sure the sci-fi movie diatribe was coming from the robotic battle armor rather than the alien inside it. Freed from his wrestling hold, Ox grabs the slug-shaped alien and throws him across the room. He proceeds to pummel it against the wall with his fists until the body armor is in shambles and its soft insides start to leak onto the floor.
The rest of the Cosmic Guard appears to have gotten what it came for, because the room is empty. You look around for the man who was giving orders and spot the remnants of a tweed jacket pinned between the slug and the basement wall. Ouch. That can’t be a pleasant way to go.
The Ox picks up the man’s tablet computer, which has been flung halfway across the room. He looks pissed. “I don’t know who these assholes are, but I say we follow them back to whatever hole they crawled out of and keep hitting stuff until we find out.”
He pauses for a moment, staring at you. “Dude, what the hell are you covered in?”
Your curiosity is more than a little piqued, but deep down you’re still a reporter. With a little effort you might be able to dig up some information on whatever’s going on before charging off with guns blazing. Also, you just killed someone, or at the very least something, and you’re not sure how to react to that yet.
But if aliens are truly invading, there might not be time for junk like research and feelings.
▶ If you like the sound of Ox’s hitting-things plan, click here for page 136.
▶ If you think you can find more answers by harnessing the power of journalism, click here for page 40.
127
We get that you’re being cautious and all, but you’ve been a cosmic space hero for almost a full day now, and you’re going to have to actually do something heroic eventually. You don’t think maybe this is your big chance?
▶ Okay, fine. If you head to D.C. to have a stupid battle with the stupid supervillains, click here for page 188.
▶ But knowing is half the battle! If you remain alone in the Himalayas communing with your robot battlesuit, click here for page 290.
128
“Come on,” you say. Octavia has more than proven herself in battle, and your gut tells you that you may need to pull that mass-brain-blast trick again before the day is over. You morph the armor into its passenger configuration, and Octavia climbs into the pod. It’s a tight fit, but it’ll have to do. It also uses up a significant portion of the suit’s mass, leaving the rest of you less protected than you’d like. Comfortable back there? You know she can’t be, curled up like a fetus.
That’s when it hits you. This configuration isn’t meant for a passenger at all.
Even with suspended animation for interstellar travel, host bodies don’t live forever. But the armor is designed to last indefinitely. The pod is where you grow the clone. Properly grafting to an individual host’s DNA can take years, so why not just grow a new host, with identical DNA, during the long trip between planets? The result would be an empty vessel without memory, or language, or opinions about how to run the show.
After a journey home and back to Earth again, you had a fully grown, 18-year-old Sten Jannsen clone living in your backpack. Of course, you hadn’t followed protocol in raising him — you talked with him, read him stories, shared fully immersive memories from Sten’s childhood. You tried to teach him right from wrong. He was your constant companion for almost two decades. It may not have been a traditional upbringing, but your plan was to bring him to a backup battlesuit that was hidden under the Pacific ocean. After a careful bonding process, Sten Junior would have been free to live his own life at last.
Of course, that all ended over Cleveland. The battlesuit they sent for the Ox was designed specifically to mesh with the target’s DNA and — like your backup suit — it was inactive, subsisting on a reserve of biochemical sludge and waiting for a host to graft to. However, it wasn’t without protection. The inferior shielding of your armor’s pod configuration left you exposed, and the other battlesuit’s automatic defenses aimed for the younger, stronger Sten first. He was dead before the meteor — or what you assumed was a meteor, anyway — even entered Earth’s atmosphere.
You’re overwhelmed with grief. And rage. Rocketing into the sky at top speed, you reach the alien mothership in a matter of minutes. It’s immense. Octavia has been trying to console you, but now her thoughts turn to the job at hand. What do you know about this thing?
Nothing. You have no information on the ship whatsoever. You’ve met the alien creatures who built it only once, as far as you can remember. Octavia peeks inside the craft with her mind, and immediately withdraws, shocked. Oh my god — so full of hate. How does a whole race of beings become like that? She steels herself and tries again. Wait… I sense something else in there. The ship itself has an artificial intelligence. It’s not as advanced as yours — here, see if you can help me.
She links your thoughts to hers, and you stretch out with your own awareness. The moment you do, though, you can sense the Cosmic Guard approaching. It’s the entire army, as far as you can tell. You don’t have much time.
You find that some of the ship’s programming is similar to your own, and you quickly establish a link. Can we reprogram it to turn around? Octavia asks. To just leave, and go home?
As soon as the aliens realized what was happening, they’d just hit the brakes and come right back. What you need is to trigger a self-destruct mechanism.
I’m not finding any such command, Octavia says.
Well, what about jury-rigging one? The ship has two drive engines. What if you set one engine on one course, and the other on a different course, and have both jump to light speed?
That — Octavia pauses. That would work. Are you seeing what I am, though? The explosion would be massive. It would kill us, too.
Not if we jump to lightspeed first, you think.
The Cosmic Guardians are starting to arrive. Destroying the mothership will certainly destroy the lot of them as well, and Octavia hesitates at the idea. The hosts inside the battlesuits may be innocent, you think, but surely they’re beyond saving — their minds would have all been hollowed out long ago, and the pod-grown clones likely never even had minds to begin with. Still, your thoughts turn to Sten Junior. He was grown in a pod. Was he worth saving?
Octavia has an alternative plan. We could brain-blast them all, and reprogram the lot in one fell swoop! How much damage can the mothership do once we’ve taken out its army of stormtroopers?
How much damage, indeed? Would reprogramming the Cosmic Guard stop the aliens’ terraforming plan? Is it worth risking all of Earth to save a handful of host bodies that are probably too far gone to even know they’ve been saved?
▶ If you blow up the ship, click here for page 306.
▶ If you blast the Guardians to make them play nicely with their insane hosts, click here for page 213.
131
It’s an age-old question, debated ad nauseam by superhero geeks all over the world: who would win in a fight? Magnifico or Nightwatchman? Would cunning, strategy, and meticulous planning be enough to overcome raw, unbridled power? The crux of the fanboy argument for Nightwatchman is that he’s always three moves ahead. Prepared for any contingency, his tactical genius would assure that he had everything worked out in advance, and the battle would be over before it even began.
None of this, of course, even vaguely describes your situation. You throw an exploding boomerang and charge Magnifico with full flash-blinding, gas-pumping, sonic-screeching fury, waving your arms around like a crazy person.
What you get in return is a heaping tablespoon of laser vision, right in the face. Does your wild frenzy at least create a distraction so Magnifica can take the brute down?
You’ll never know.
THE END
132
The element of surprise has worked for you so far, and although it’s is a bit of a crapshoot, you hope to at least take the invaders off guard. The rocket pods require a crew of five to fly them properly, so you have the Savage Cockroach split himself into half a dozen clones, all linked together in one big hive mind. It’s the perfect piloting solution, but turns out to be unnecessary — a single red button engages the pod’s autopilot and blasts off right toward your intended target: the alien mothership.
You find a stash of space suits — some among your assortment of misshapen rogues don’t quite fit into them perfectly, but you use purple supergoo to patch up the seals. It’s a surprisingly short trip through space in the windowless pod, and in less than an hour your craft is met by the mothership’s docking clamps. This is it. You’ve bet the future of your entire planet (and, more importantly, your own hide) on this one fight. You have only one chance at this!
You send the henchmen out (you’re not stupid). Fortunately, whatever the alien overlords were expecting to emerge from the pods, it wasn’t dozens of amped-up supervillains on a warpath. Your foes turn out to be huge, hideous fleshbags with stick-like, bony appendages, but they aren’t wearing the armor of the Cosmic Guard, and when it comes to physical combat, they’re actually kind of wussies. The Ox throws their big, bloated bodies around the docking bay like rag dolls, and Suong — even without any firm grasp of her coordinates in the void of space — opens a portal to an empty expanse of Pacific ocean back on Earth, where they quickly suffocate and drown. Even Pterodactyl Girl has little trouble dispatching them. The battle is over before your foes have the chance to radio their shock troops for help.
Victory! You’ve managed to thwart an alien plot to take over the world, and, to be honest, it wasn’t even that hard. A few of your soldiers suffered suit punctures and quickly succumbed to the poisonous alien atmosphere, but the casualties are more than acceptable. You send Tinker and some of his brighter peers out to scout the enormous ship, and they discover several thousand more aliens stored in suspended animation, as well as what appear to be two giant machines designed to replace the Earth’s ecosystem with the mothership’s toxic brown gas. This was a colonization mission, you realize, and there’s very little chance that any living thing on the planet would have survived it.
So what now? Tinker and Ox are terribly excited about turning the ship into an interstellar base of operations for your new criminal empire, and the idea does have its appeal. With Suong’s portals — that girl is crazy powerful — you can come and go as you please.
The aliens have provided something more than just a bitchin’ clubhouse, though: they’ve given you the ultimate doomsday device. Their plan is already halfway to fruition, and you’re a goddamn criminal mastermind — why not follow through and hold the entire world hostage until they bow down and submit to your will?
That’s freaking supervillainy, yo.
▶ If you use the atmospheric converters to bring the entire population of the Earth to its knees, click here for page 255.
▶ If that sounds a little melodramatic and you’d rather just ride around in your new spaceship being awesome, click here for page 206.
134
You decide it’s best to talk to Dale and find out just what he thinks he knows. It takes you a while to get out of your armor, but once you do, it shifts around and reconfigures itself into a big, shiny blue suitcase. The thing actually weighs about two tons, but it does some kind of anti-gravity hovering thing that allows you to carry it. The overall effect looks a little floaty and weird, but if you hold it just right, it passes for normal.
The street out front still looks like a war zone — maybe you should have done something to stop the Ox after all? — but your favorite bar is still open for business. You find Dale in his usual seat, a nearly-empty beer glass in front of him. He doesn’t even seem to notice the suitcase.
“Have you seen Melah?” he asks. “She isn’t answering her phone.”
Smart girl. “Listen, Dale. About earlier today…”
“Yeah, let’s talk about that.” He finishes his drink, and then just stares at you for a moment. “I’m going to outline a situation, purely hypothetical, of course. Let’s say you’re drinking one morning with your two closest friends, hammering out details for the greatest local news website the greater Cleveland metropolian area has ever seen.”
Sigh. “Sounds pretty out there,” you say.
“It’s a thought experiment,” he continues. “Just bear with me. So all of a sudden a comet and an exploding bank and all these superheroes happen, and you and your friends split up to follow different leads. But once your friends are gone, imagine that something unbelievable happens to you.”
“Dale…”
“No, let me talk. You wind up making this amazing discovery, getting this fantastic opportunity… gaining powers far beyond those of mortal men. So what do you do? Do you go back and tell your friends about it? Or do you keep it to yourself, worried that they won’t understand, or that just by telling them, you’ll be putting their lives in danger?”
He pauses, picking up his glass again before realizing that it’s empty. “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he says, “and I know what I would do.”
“Listen Dale, we need to think this through very—”
“I’m a superhero!” he exclaims, holding out one hand over the table. Some kind of gooey substance is excreted from his pores, quickly covering his fist and then hardening into a solid purple shell. Frankly, it’s pretty gross. He explains that when you and Melah left, he stayed behind to monitor the Ox and fell into the impact crater, hitting his head on the fallen comet and blacking out. When he woke up, he had purple goo powers.
